To get Wil’s In This Together, The Jessica Stuart Few’s Kid Dream, and Yukon Blonde’s self-titled debut, email me (Subject: Wil The Yukon) and tell me which show you’re planning on going to.
Congratulations to our reader Joanne Rosen!
(In case you’re wondering, she’ll be at the In-Flight Safety show at Lucky…)

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I first met Jon Middleton a couple years ago when we were both doin’ time, makin’ big batches of wine for the masses at Cook Street Village Wine Works. It was almost Christmas, a very busy time of year for any U-Brew, and the owners were kind enough to take pity on my carboy-busted back by bringing in their buddy Jonny to help out for a couple weeks. They said, “Jonny’s a musician, you guys will get along great!”

At first, I was skeptical about their decision to bring a musician in to help out. I envisioned some silver-spoon-fed prima donna; a David Lee Roth type, who would guzzle more wine than he made, who would play air-guitar along with anthems such as “Rock Me Like a Hurricane” whenever they were played on our shitty little radio in the back. I couldn’t have been more far off. Read the rest of this entry »

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Remix club DJs from New York. With Kenzie Clarke and BNGZ N KRLZ.
FRIDAY 9pm at Sugar. $15.

You might think that raves were something that happened ten years ago, in the woods, with sweaty, colourful kids in various states of inebriation dancing wildly. You’re only wrong about a few things. Like the woods part. And the “ten years ago.”

At this moment, all across America young people are donning jazzercise wear and over-sized glasses. Emboldened by bass, booze, and the love of self-documentation, these neo-Club Kids plan to party into the wee hours. Such may be the case on Friday, when two remix DJs calling themselves Designer Drugs hit Sugar Nightclub. (Check out MySpace to see photo evidence of the potential good times.)

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I wasn’t quite sure what to expect as I walked into the Bonfire Ball on Saturday night. A friend of mine had seen the show in Seattle a couple nights prior and simply told me that I was in for a surprise—and to be sure that I got there right on time…

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Ian Morris does chalk art throughout the year on Government Street, in front of Munro’s Books.

How long have you lived in Victoria?
Since February 2000.

Don’t you get cold?
Oh yeah. Hunkered down to close to the sidewalk, you get cold. I worked for years as a commercial fisherman, picking sea urchins underwater. I’m used to working in the cold.

Why did you move to Victoria?
I was living in Campbell River and commercial fishing kind of died, so I moved here. To seek my fortune.

Where did you learn to draw?
Practice, ever since I was a child. I went to art school at Ottawa U and Concordia in Montreal.

How do you pick your pictures?
Whatever strikes me that day. I quite often pick an artist and run through their repertoire ’til I get tired of it. Lately it’s been Waterhouse.

It reminds me a little of Buddhist monks who do the sand mandalas as a reminder of the impermanence of life.
Yeah, well we’re living in a society that’s immersed in commercialism and materialism. Ever since our kind started walking, millions of generations have been hunter-gatherers. It’s only in the last 10,000 or so years that we turned to agrarianism, and that finished only about a hundred years ago. If you ask most people if this lifestyle we’re living is normal, most will say “no.” Our pursuit of material wealth, burning up everything around us — it’s not natural. So in a very subtle way, I try to demonstrate the futility of it.

Do you call yourself a street artist?
The Italians called it novinare. Back in the 15th century they started this kind of work. The English call it being a screevner. You know Bert from Mary Poppins? Screevner.